This article addresses the question of women’s wages by focusing on the auxiliary tasks of weaving and the women who carried them out in eighteenth-century Lyon silk industry. The registers of the police des métiers, that had not been studied systematically until now, are an essential source for understanding the daily conflicts over the value of work within a productive universe marked by strong hierarchies, gender discrimination and power relationships. In addition to demonstrating that women could take such matters to court, they allow us to analyse the value attributed to the work and to the word of women by the community of masters and merchants and by the consular institutions.